


Dissolve Me

by magpie_03



Series: Down the mountain range of my left-side brain [13]
Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Ableism, Amnesia, Depression, Dissociation, Hospitalization, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mood Disorder, Mood Swings, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-22
Updated: 2019-01-22
Packaged: 2019-10-12 22:32:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17476175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magpie_03/pseuds/magpie_03
Summary: This is a one shot. Big trigger warning for self harm. Don't read if you're feeling unwell or are triggered easily.





	Dissolve Me

For other people the line between a good and a bad day, a good and a bad mood is wide enough. It allows for variation. Just because you're staggering slightly doesn't mean you're losing direction. Just because you're stumbling doesn't mean that your world is about to crash.

For Tyler, the line is nano meters wide. He keeps swinging back and forth, side to side, up and down. His moods change suddenly and drastically, without warning, without a real chance to prepare. It catches him off guard and by the time he realized what's going on he's already on the ground, trying to mend his broken bones. He can be fine (for Tyler) one day and on the verge of tears the next. Engaged in a conversation one moment, staring blankly into space the other. The physical and emotional exhaustion his mood swings bring hollows him out and yet it's the only thing he's used to, the only thing he knows, the only thing that feels like some kind of identity. _Unwell. Sick. Crazy._   He can't remember what it's like to be a healthy, normal, functioning human being.

It's like having someone scream into your ear all day and once it's gone, the silence scares you.

He's forgotten how to care for himself, how to make himself feel safe again. Words aren't enough for this. _I feel sad_ doesn't come close to what it feels like to lie on the floor crying until you can't speak. _I'm angry_ doesn't describe what it's like to bite yourself and bang your head against the walls of your apartment. 

_Anxiety. Depression. Dissociation.  
_

These aren't just symptoms and signs. They are feelings, they are emotions so powerful they quickly spiral into a new and distorted reality, a world in which every touch, every word hurts because you don't think you deserve them. A world in which being alive feels like being exposed to something vast, cruel and raw.

The distance he feels to any kind of normality is brutal, it tears everything apart. In some other, parallel universe he should be with his family and his boyfriend, they should be having dinner together, they should talk about their days, about work, about that new music project Tyler and Josh have been working on for a while now. But he's sitting on an examining table in the ER, holding a plastic cup of orange juice that he can't remember drinking from and presses a towel on his arm. He's shivering so hard a nurse touches his shoulder. "Do you need something to calm down?"

He shakes his head. He isn't scared. He's numb with pain.

He's beyond pain.

Beyond language.

_What happened? When did it happen?_

Tyler stays silent. Trying to remember the last few hours feels like trying to play a broken VHS tape. The images inside his mind jump forwards and backwards without context, without coherency. Yesterday. The day before. Josh. His family. He knows who they are. Knows what he did yesterday and the day before. But he can't tell how he felt during the last 48 hours. They watched TV. He stayed in bed. Sweatpants. Josh's hoodie. Covers pulled up to his chin. Curtains shut. He drank a lot of tea too quickly, his tongue is still burned. Josh sorted his medications into his pill box. He took 14 pills during the last 48 hours. Yellow, white, white, white, pink, yellow, white. Yellow, white, white, white, pink, yellow, white. Sleep sleep. Repeat. Repeat.

Locking doors. Again and again.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 

Repeat. Repeat.

He doesn't know what lead to this, what made him forget again. He presses the fingernails of his right hand into his palm but his flesh doesn't give him the answer. It just turns white under the pressure.

After a particularly bad episode he started to write the essentials – his name, address, and Josh's phone number – on his hands to help him remember. A safety net of skin and flesh. But there's nothing on his hands now except crusted blood.

_Can you tell me your name? Can you tell me your date of birth? Do you know where you are?_

_I don't know I don't know I don't know._ He attempts to form the syllables but nothing comes out. _I am crazy I am crazy am I am I am I?_ Is what stays inside.

_I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy I am crazy  
_

He starts to rock back and forth. The orange juice sloshes inside the cup.

 _crazy_ _crazy_ _crazy_

Words that clot until they are crusted, words like scabs you pick at until they become scars, too.

_Do you have a history of self-harm?_

Self-harm isn't a word. It's a feeling. A reality that begins when you wake up in the morning and don't feel like yourself and ends in the hospital, a towel wrapped around your arm. You don't realize it's bad until you see that unlike the other 97% of the people in the ER you don't have to wait. Instead, a nurse escorts you to an examination room and makes you sit on a table right away. She doesn't leave the room until a surgeon comes stomping in.

_Snap. Snap._

"Show me your arm."

He doesn't ask for his name. He doesn't have to. It's only January but it's been a bad couple of weeks and Tyler has been at the hospital a lot.

This life, this body is a prison and he marks each day by scratching another set of tally marks on his skin.

It's only January.

It's been 22 days.

Tyler has never felt so exposed during the following minutes when it's just the surgeon examining his arm, half of his face hidden by a mask and the nurse who assists him, the look on her face unreadable. He wants to reassure them, wants to reassure himself that he didn't intend to do this, he didn't mean to end up in the ER again but there are no words, just pure physical pain that makes him want to vomit. His arm is vomiting too. There's a gaping wound that's vomiting it all up, a steady stream of something bright and red that used to be inside him, all that is bad and mad. The surgeon picks and pokes at his body, his life. That bit of scarred, dead flesh. 

He starts to gather his materials and, with his back turned to Tyler, begins to ask the usual questions, firing them at him one by one.

"When did you do this?"

"With what?"

"Are you suicidal?"

Tyler stares at the ground. He knows how the surgeon will read and interpret his behavior but he can't remember the last hours and amnesia tends to be the thing you can't talk about when you're affected.

He vaguely remembers getting out of bed this morning and not feeling himself. He remembers thinking about cutting but there's a black hole from when he went to the bathroom to this. How did he get here? Did he admit himself? Who found him?

"Did you talk to psych? I need someone to assess him."

Now he's just a patient who's being uncooperative. Non-compliant.

Tyler wants to tell him. He wants to tell him how living like this, like _this_ , feels like trying to control a flood with only one towel. It's going to get soaked, it's going to get heavy and useless in the face of an almightly wave.

He wants to tell him that he did this to be in control, to feel like he's in control, and yet it landed him here where people assess him and refer him and do things to his body that are way beyond his reach. In some distant future he knows he'll end up having to rate his mood from 1 to 10 again. It'll end up as it always does: with someone yanking the shoelaces out of his shoes. With windows and doors you can't open.

Tyler jumps as the surgeon pours the iodine straight on his arm. This time a half-word leaves his mouth.  A bird noise. The surgeon scoffs.

"When I look at your arm I'm surprised you still feel any pain at all. Next time you're here I'm not going to use a local anesthetic to stich you back up."

Tyler accepts the cruelty with a calm mind, the kind of quiet calm that washes over you when you're so overwhelmed your brain focuses on one thing alone. Self-destruction as a coping mechanism. He's got enough reasons to hate himself and now he's got one more.

There's something inside him, something that moves and murmurs and whispers, something that makes the back of his neck prickle. Something that won't come to a standstill until he's stolen a scalpel because they are so much better than regular razor blades. He's scanning the room. He needs a way out. He needs to be in control. He needs 1, 2 3, 4, 5.

He can feel the syringe going into his arm. Anesthesia is amnesia for the body: it makes you forget pain.

If anesthesia is amnesia for the body, dissocation is the tingling you feel when your body falls asleep. Right arm. Left arm.

_Mind awake_

_Body asleep_

Tyler's body stays on the table. His head floats through the ceiling.

_Mind awake_

_Body asleep_

The minutes after. There's red on the floor as if a creature had ran through the room and disappeared again, in fright, in terror. The surgeon peels off his gloves – _snap snap_ – and throws them into the bin. Tyler hasn't moved - he doesn't have a body yet.

The surgeon stomps out of the room again. He watched someone else getting stitches. Now he's watching the nurse watch him, her eyes directed on a body that's frozen in fear. Stitches, medical glue, gauze. A poor substitute for a body, a life.

Another doctor enters the room. She kneels in front of the table and talks in a low, quiet voice. She doesn't wear blue gloves. Her fingertips touch his knees.

"Tyler, do you need us to call someone? Josh? Your parents?"

He bursts into tears.


End file.
